Subspace Encounter Part 4

"Hold everything, Starr sweetheart, I'm coming!" he snapped the thought; then, pausing only to s.n.a.t.c.h three flashlights from a hardware store half a mile away, he teleported himself into the FirSec's office and grabbed her in his arms. To say that she grabbed him back is an understatement indeed. She tried with everything she had to pressure-fuse her body into one with his.

"Oh Rod, darling!" she telepathed intensely, apparently unaware that she was not speaking aloud, even though her mouth was in no position to do any talking.

"Nothing works-not even the lights or the air-what was it? It even hurt my head! What happened." He did not answer her questions. Instead, "Why didn't you tell me you were psychic, you fathead?" He snarled the thought.

"And good enough to fake a perfect blank when I probed you."

"But I'm no such..."she began to protest; then realizing what she was actually doing, her thoughts for a second or two were a really mixed-up mess, a potpourri of everything from seeing herself smashed into eaglemeat and thrown into a cage, up to ruling with her Rodnar the entire Justiciate. She forced herself to steady down, then went on, using telepathy consciously and perfectly, "I never was psionic before, I mean. Honestly, I never had a psychic bone in my head."

"I see you weren't. I'm sorry I popped off, Starr-I never even heard of such a terrifically sudden development in my life. You were a very strong latent-tremendously strong-and the shock blasted you wide open. So you're one of us now, whether you want to be or not. So I've got to take a secondgive you enough stuff so you can protect yourself until I can really induct you-ready."

"I'm eager."

"Here it comes," and it came. Such a mind as his could send, and such a mind as hers could a.s.similate, an incredible amount of information in an incredibly short time. Hence, in a very few seconds, she had learned what the true situation was, had accepted it, and had aligned herself solidly with her lover and what she thought of as being "his" psiontists. He released her mind and said, "There. That'll hold you until I can finish the job. In the meantime, keep a tendril of thought hooked onto me wherever either of us may be and don't let your guard down for a fraction of a nanosecond without checking with me first."

"Oh?" The thought was almost a schoolgirl's squeal of delight.

"It works at a distance, then? How far?"

"n.o.body knows. Interstellar certainly-all over the Justiciate-probably all over the galaxy. But chop it, we've got."

"Wait up, Rod. What happened? What was it? One of those X-storms of yours."

"I don't know. If it was, it was the d.a.m.ndest one that ever happened-n.o.body ever heard of anything like it before... but an X-storm couldn't do that to you. Not possibly. That was a psychic shock you got, not a physical one... He paused in thought. She thought, too, for an instant, then caught her breath.

"Then how about His Magnificence?" she whispered, even in thought.

"Suppose he got a psychic shock, too."

"Uh-uh. Not a chance in the world that he was a strong enough latent, if a latent at all-it could hardly happen once, let alone twice. I'll show you. Come along, you do it like this," and he insinuated their linked minds into the mind of His Magnificence Supreme Grand Justice Sonrathendak Ranjak of Slaar.

"Good Heavens! You mean he can't even feel us?" she demanded incredulously, flicking an exploratory feeler of her newly-acquired sixth sense over the hypersurface of the Supreme Grand Justice's mind, which was now, to all intents and purposes, a monocellular layer, each individual element of which was wide open for her inspection.

"No, he can't feel us at all," Rodnar a.s.sured her.

"Nonpsionic minds are strictly three-dimensional, we're working through the fourth. This is a slimy trick and we do it only when we absolutely have to, but there's a reason, so go ahead."

"Oh, the poor old guy," she crooned, after a moment.

"Rod, he's simply scared to death-scared witless-he's sure it's a plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate him and he can't get hold of even mehe can't even find the door-Rod, I've got to."

"Of course you have!" Rodnar snapped.

"That was what I wanted you to see. For yourself, not by my telling you. The solider an in you can get with him the better, and this is the chance of our lifetimes. Have you got a flashlight."

"Of course not. Who ever needed a flashlight here?"

"You do now, little chum, so here's a couple of 'em. Tell His Nibs you've had 'em all the time in case of emergency. Blaster, of course."

"Two, and I can take the left eye right out of a gnat eitherhanded."

"Fine! It's possible you'll have a chance to use 'em. So dash in there-tell him you've sent a messengerthat's me but don't of course tell him so-to tell the engineers to get the lead out and to bring up three electric lanterns-I'll send 'em-and he'll have air and lights very shortly and the rest of the stuff as soon as possible. Then tell him you'll protect him until the Purps show up, and do it-guard him like a mother hen with one chick, with all your scanners out-you'll find you've got plenty of 'em-stiff spine, sweetheart! 'Bye!" He squeezed her tight, kissed her hard, and vanished from the inwardpressing circle of her arms. Starrlah buckled on her blasters, dashed across the room to the door of the sanctum sanctorum, opened it a crack, and sent the powerful beam of one flashlight sidewise into the room. No one, not even his First Secretary and not even in such circ.u.mstances as these, ever intruded uninvited upon The Presence. Even in such circ.u.mstances? Especially in such, the girl thought, as she looked on mentally while the badly frightened ruler, taking advantage of the diffused light of the FirSec's torch, dashed back into the chair behind his desk and fought for self-control. Then, as though there had been no delay at alland, to give Ranjak credit, there hadn't been much-the girl said quietly.

"Your Magnificence, it is I, Starrlah. Have I your permission, sir, to bring you a light." She heard his uncontrollable gasp of relief.

"Indeed you may, Starrlah," he said, quite uncharacteristically.

"Come in at once." She went in, closed and locked the door behind her, and clanged its triple bars of tool steel down into their hold-fast slots. She handed Ranjak one of the flashlights, then began to brace the other one upright on his desk so that its beam would bounce off of a cl.u.s.ter of jewels on the ceiling.

"Lights and blasters both, my dear?" Ranjak asked, quietly. His first flash of thought, naturally, had been that she was the a.s.sa.s.sin, but that hadn't lasted long. He was steadying down fast, this FirSec of his was becoming more and more of a revelation every minute.

"Thank you."

"Yes, sir. Two of each in my desk, a! ways," she said crisply, piling one more book against the torch and testing the structure thus finished with a strong push of a forefinger.

"There; that will give us light enough to shoot by." The flared light formed a nimbus around the bushy white hair of His Magnificence. She pulled both blasters and handed one of them to him b.u.t.t first. He accepted the weapon with an uncharacteristic, "Thank you, Starrlah," unrestrained relief in his voice, then added, "Have you any idea what happened."

"No, sir, I've no idea whatever. I sent a messenger to the engineers and your Guards of the Person..." and she went on with a machine-gun-fast report of what she and Rodnar had decided she should say; watching his mind the while to be sure that she was making the best possible impression-which she was-and concluding, "... if they are our people they'll pound on that door in code, and I'll know it's safe to open. If they aren't... well..." she swung the barrel of her blaster so that it clicked lightly against the barrel of his, "... well, we've enough power here, Your Magnificence, to melt a million tons of rock down onto us before they burn us down. And that statement didn't hurt her standing a bit with His Nibs, either.

7 - THE GREAT X-STORM.

No Previous single X-storm had ever affected more than one planet of the Justiciate, but this one struck four worlds- Slaar, Orm, Spath, and Skane; four of the most populous and most highly industrialized worlds of that civilization-at precisely the same time. Marrjyl and Knuaire were the first persons to learn that such an incredible event had actually occurred. She, practically completely recovered from her wounds, was working with him in the Inst.i.tute's library in Meetyl when all the lights went out. Their first thought, of course, was of a simple power failure, however unprecedented such a thing was, but it took only seconds for them to find out how vastly deeper than that the real trouble was. Nor did they exclaim about or discuss the fact that nothing like it had ever happened before. What to do about it was the important thing. Quick as a flash-literally-Marrjyl's mind leaped out to Rodnar's, but stopped instantaneously at its very outermost fringes, before making any actual contact at all.

"Oo-oh!" she drove a thought at Knuaire.

"He's-they're-busy."

"Oh?" he asked, carefully, not looking.

"No, not that. How could they be, after that? Don't be a dumbster! It's... she's psionic... a full-powered psiontist."

"What?" he demanded, and peeked cautiously for himself.

"I see. Brand new. An extremely strong latent, initiated by psychic shock. It scared the living h.e.l.l out of her-so much so that she reached out and grabbed him unconsciously-and hung onto him while her supermind opened up like a fissioning bomb."

"Or rather;" she corrected him, "he opened her up."

"Of course, but if she hadn't had an unG.o.dly lot of stuff she couldn't possibly have bridged that primary gap. Also of course he'd drive her, and keep on driving her to the fullest possible development, at that desk she'll be worth a couple of dozen good psiontists and a million junex in cold cash." Pitch dark as it was, he could not see her grin, but he could feel it.

"You think that's the only reason, I don't think?"

"I don't think, my sweet. The other ones didn't need mentioning. He was sunk anyway, probably, but now he's sunk without a trace... she's a tremendous lot of woman." Marrjyl nodded, and even in the dark, Knuaire "saw."

"You can carve that on the highest cliff you can find," Marrjyl agreed.

"And I like her a lot-tremendously much-more than any other woman I know... It's funny, Knu, but I'm not the least bit jealous of her, even now, knowing that she's going to be as good a psiontist as I am."

"That's natural enough," he said.

"You're so completely different from each other that there are no points of conflict. If there were, hair would fly."

"Could be-but that's a great plenty of this fuzz-witting around." She gave herself a mental shake.

"He'll be busy a while yet, so I think I'd better start working on this thing without him. Let's jump to Orm-my lab-and find out what goes on. Agreed."

"Agreed," and the two stood, hand in hand, in a laboratory that was just as dark and just as dead, instrumentwise, as was Rodnar's own on Slaar.

"Well, ain't this something!" Marrjyl snapped, and Knuaire agreed in silence. Without wasting time in idle speculation and discussion of the extent of the disaster, he said, "Let's try Spath. My boat-in her berth at the s.p.a.ceport in our seats at the board. Jump." They jumped, and, much to their relief, found that the yacht's lighting system worked perfectly. It was the only system aboard, however, that did. None of the more delicate, more sensitive apparatuseither aboards.h.i.+p or anywhere else on the planet-worked at all, and the entire subethereal level of thought seethed and boiled with the varitoned, varicolored, furious, baffled, and bitterly profane thoughts of the men and women who were trying so hard to restore a dozen different inoperative services.

"Hm-m-m-mnh." Knuaire the Theoretician rubbed thumb and forefinger against the short bristles on his jaw.

"An Xstorm, undoubtedly. Far and away the worst ever. A picture is beginning to form, we'll see how or if it hit Skane."

"Skane? You'll have to carry me, then, I know hardly any landing-spots there at all."

"No need to go in person, I'll ask." He concentrated in thought for a second or so, then went on, "Yeah. I thought so. That gives us enough data to do some guessing on." He pressed the "CLEAR" switch of a small visitank and set three tiny lights in it, saying, "Call this the Spath-Orm-Slaar triangle..."

"I'll be glad to call it anything you say," Rodnar's thought broke in at that point.

"Hi, people! Is this instruction private, Knu, or is the public invited."

"Not the public, Rod, just you," the girl said, mentally patting the vacant seat beside her.

"We've been waiting for you to get done with that perhaps somewhat pleasanter job."

"Somewhat pleasanter?" Rodnar demanded, unabashed, suddenly appearing in the flesh.

"You kidding? If I had my way I wouldn't come out here at all, but you know how it is. 'Work is the part of life that makes it work,' curse it. So, going around your triangle counter-clockwise, it's roughly nine lightyears from Slaar to Orm, twelve from Orm to Spath, and ten from Spath back to Slaar Where do we go from there."

"We construct the Skane-Slaar-Orm-Spath tetrahedron by setting this light up here to represent Skane." The light appeared in the tank.

"Seventeen lightyears from Spath, nineteen from Slaar, and eighteen from Orm. Now. Those four planets were hit, no others. Slaar and Orm were hit terrifically hard, and about equally. Spath suffered much less, and Skane was scarcely affected at all just a little of the most delicate stuff on the planet. While these data are not quant.i.tatively exact, a.n.a.lysis shows that if a big enough X-storm originated at this point here," a red light sprang into being well outside the Slaar-Orm-Skane face of the tetrahedron, "seven, seven, ten, and fourteen lightyears respectively from Slaar, Orm, Spath, and Skane, its subs.p.a.ce reactions would do just about what was actually done." Rodnar stared at the red light and whistled through his teeth.

"Clear to h.e.l.langone out beyond nowhere," he said, thoughtfully.

"However, I think that's still inside our mine field-we went 'way, 'way out. What do you think, Marr."

"My guess would be yes, but we'd better get out there with our instruments and find out. With such a frightful storm as this, and the equipment we have out there, there certainly should be something left for us to find."

"Now you're chirping, birdie," Rodnar approved.

"Knu, can you spare the fifty-one percent for a few s.h.i.+fts?" Knuaire, smiling, held out his arms and Marrjyl went into them, snuggling luxuriously.

"It'll be tough," he said, "but in such a good cause I'll try to get along. It'll take quite a while to repair the damage here, and she can't help much on that... I hope there's something out there to find, and if there is, you two are the two to find it." ' "Thanks, fella, and 'bye. Fuse minds, Marr, and I'll carry you-from here to my flitter's a tricky jump." She responded by relaxing completely, fitting her mind to his with the practiced ease of skilled experience.

"Go." They went. Or rather, with no sense of motion and with no lapse whatever of time, they were standing in the tiny control room of Rodnar's subspeedster in its underground stall at Meetyl s.p.a.ceport. The s.p.a.ceport's controls and attendant robots were all inoperable, of course, so that no normal takeoff was possible. The little subber's instruments were dead, too-but that fact wouldn't necessarily keep them on Slaar. He could 'port his speedster out, but should he? No psiontist ever had done anything like it, as far as he knew... and in one way he certainly shouldn't...

"How about it, Marr?" he asked then.

"The faster we get out there the more we'll learn, and if we wait for repairs I'm afraid we'll be too late to learn anything at all."

"So am I." She gnawed her lip.

"We've got to get out there fast, Rod, so I say go ahead."

"Shall do," he said, and went ahead, and, such was the turmoil and confusion, no one noticed that a certain subspeedster was in a certain stall one instant but was not in it the next. Even the thunderclap (junior grade) of noise, of air smas.h.i.+ng in to fill a vacuum, went unnoticed. Since Rodnar's detectors, scanners, and surveying instruments generally had not been in operation during the storm, and since they were of necessity s.h.i.+elded to the limit against all known types and kinds of interference, it did not take long to replace the few supersensitive relays and other extradelicate components that had been burned out. Then the two psiontists gave their "minefield" a quick once-over... and when it was done Marrjyl put her head down on her arms on the table and cried... and Rodnar felt very much like doing the same thing. For of their sixty protective generators, only one was in operation and it was limping. Where each of the fifty-nine other great machines had been there was either sheer noth- ingness or, at most, a few shapeless blobs of once-fused metal. After a minute or so Marrjyl sat up, gulped, wiped her eyes, and said, "I think that was deliberate, Rod, don't you? I don't believe that anything natural could possibly have done that much of that kind of destruction."

"I simply don't know what to think, Marr." Rodnar's voice and mien were somber.

"But you said it'that much of that kind.' I can't imagine any natural phenomenon that would or could do it, it's all wrong in every aspect of scope, magnitude, and type. But on the other hand I can't conceive of any mobile structure ever built by man carrying that much power."

"Who said anything about 'man'?" she asked, quietly. Rodnar scowled.

"You may have a point there," he admitted, "but let's not go clear off the deep end until we see what the cameras and recorders aboard that one installation got. If anything." It must be emphasized at this point that a subs.p.a.ce "camera" is not an optical instrument, and that in subs.p.a.ce the term "distance" is, in the ordinary sense, meaningless. Thus, subs.p.a.ce cameras operate practically instantaneously throughout starkly unimaginable volumes of three-dimensional s.p.a.ce. Ultrapowerful and ultralong-range though they were, however, those instruments had obtained very little data; and that little was baffling, frustrating, and tantalizing in the extreme. For one thing, the action had been at such fantastically long range that the signal was almost completely drowned out by noise, and the pictures were almost completely obliterated by obliterated by snow. And second, the forces there unleashed had been of such h.e.l.lish intensity and magnitude that, even at that incomprehensible distance, the s.h.i.+elding had failed lamentably to protect vital elements of the instrumentation from damage. Rodnar and Marrjyl did, however, get something, and, after doing everything possible to the science of their age in the way of cleaning up, delousing, reinforcement, and intensification, they stared alternately at the product of their labors and at each other It was a s.h.i.+p-but what a s.h.i.+p! It was neither a sphere nor a cube, but appeared to be long and quite slender, with a ratio of about five or six to one. The thing's exact size could not be determined, of course, but every applicable criterion indicated a structure so huge that it could not possibly have been built on any planet of the Justiciate. It was not clear whether it had been attacked first or...

"It must have attacked, Marr," Rodnar declared.

"Those generators of ours weren't weapons, they were simply neutralizers. They couldn't do any damage to anything."

"To anything of ours, no. To anything we can think of as being possible of construction, no. But look there, and all along there." She swept a pictured area with her hand.

"If that gigantic thing's armor isn't getting all chewed to bits I'll eat the first piece of it we find; and you don't think it's trying to destroy itself, do you."

"I think you're stretching your imagination all out of shape," he said.

"I think that those funny-looking markings are simply defects in the transmission and flaws caused by our own manhandling; it was right next door to being nothing at all, you know..." He paused in thought, then went on, "... but you could be fight, of course. If so, they could have thought they were being attacked and fought back... but how could they possibly have destroyed fifty-nine such installations as those in little over one second."

"I've no more idea than you have, but it's one somewhat cheerful thought that they didn't destroy this sixtieth one, too, so their power at least isn't infinite. The worst thing is that they'll now think that we're savages, that we attacked on detection. Blindly, stupidly."

"That doesn't necessarily follow. They must be highly intelligent...

"That for sure. I wonder what they look like. Monsters, s 'pose."

"I'm not a d.a.m.n bit sure I care ever to find out... but if they are actually as smart as they must be it's quite possiblemaybe even probable-that they got enough data out of the meeting to deduce the whole truth. But to get back to our knitting, where in all the h.e.l.ls of s.p.a.ce did it go to when it disappeared." Marrjyl gnawed her lip.

"I wouldn't know... It couldn't have stayed in subs.p.a.ce, and if it had emerged any place our lock-ons would have held it..." Her eyes narrowed suddenly.

"Remember what I said about 'other s.p.a.ce,' Rod? I didn't really believe it then and it doesn't make any kind of sense now, but what else is left."

"Oh, chop it off!" he snorted.

"There's no theory to cover even the possibility of any other s.p.a.ce."

"So? Answer my question, then. What's left."